Tuesday, February 17, 2004

What
if Frank O’Hara had been, literally, a court jester? Or, at the very least,
tutor of the King’s children? Those are questions that linger in the
imagination as one reads Pattie McCarthy’s forthcoming Verso. In “alibi (that is : elsewhere),” the second of the book’s
three sections – and the one section that is available already as a Duration
Press ebook – McCarthy strikes a new tone in & for
her poetry, less formal, almost personal. At the same time, however, all of the
concerns – with history, naming, gender, etymology & referentiality – that
have always animated her work rage on unabated. Not atypical: alibi is Latin for elsewhere.

The
tone in the sequence’s first poem comes off as quite campy:

nonesuch auguries,
egads.

we will have none of that.

saying again this place is

this, only moreso.

here the air

rises from beneath it

seems & is heavy salty—

whereas there the air is sharp,

takes corners, comes around

corners sharply.

it hasn’t rained for fourteen days. the birds

have thwarted me & eaten the verbena
seeds.

I smell like a girl & tire of profundity.

In
what reads like an act of utter divergence, the very next piece quotes
Thackeray, Chaucer & Shakespeare, all on the subject on augury. If an alibi
literally is a mode of displacement – “I was not at X when Y took place” – then
divination is likewise predicated on an ability to read details, as if the
whole universe took on the symbolic qualities we usually reserve for words.

It
takes McCarthy only three more pages to blend all these elements & arrive
at this remarkable level of density:

there one is afraid of that

which is invisible whereas

here one fears that which is seen.

with maps, one could endeavor to prove

one’s self alibi.

no one leaves here ever if

only there was another.

it’s not safe sometimes to meddle with walls.

the fall of Jane Scrope’s sparrow.

if by making certain

conditions of the air — well, that’s how they
took

the poison in those
days.

One part Gertrude Stein, perhaps, one part John Skelton,
definitely. It was, it’s worth remembering, not the wall that caused the
death of Jane Scrope’s sparrow, but the presence of
the cat Gyb. The wall, however, is what McCarthy
wants us to if not see at least feel, pressing on us at all points. Thus an allusion to a poem 500 years old in what at first reads as
if it were “plain speech.”

The
problem of knowledge in poetry has bedeviled modernism & what’s come after
since Pound first edited T.S. Eliot in order to make him more, not less,
cryptic. Where Robert Duncan wrote of “the secret doctrine,” Charles Olson
countered that “such secrecy is wearing the skin that truth is inside-out.”* There was a day certainly when every college student – at
least the English majors – could have been expected to recognize that sparrow, but, save for the Straussians,
that day died before my years in college in the 1960s. McCarthy appears to have
found a writing that lets her – and us – have it both ways, by making the
membrane between the visible & its opposite the
focal point. Which, to my mind, is where O’Hara comes in,
perhaps the most eloquent practitioner ever of what I might characterize as
cloaked rhetoric, the complex articulation tossed off as if it were a
spontaneous aside.

The
word McCarthy finds for this is an Irish one, pishogue, which, in a pluralized Irish spelling – “piseogs”
– is the title of the third major sequence in Verso. Spells might be a good English translation, sayings that by
their very nature convey witchcraft. This section reads very much as the notes
to an investigation into the murder of Bridget Cleary, an 1894 case of an Irish housewife burned alive by her
husband in the belief that she’d been stolen by the faerie folk.

Wisdom,
magic, reference – all systems that hinge upon a coming into representation,
the word made flesh, even if only so that it might be burnt. Verso, in this sense, has another
meaning – the same one we find hidden in the word verse, that constant, compulsive turning, from the visible &
back again, from the magic to the muggle, the meaning to the word, a perpetual,
ineluctable shuttling back & forth, as restless as the imagination.

From
the very beginning, Pattie McCarthy has been one of our most intellectually
ambitious poets – a tradition she shares with Rachel Blau DuPlessis &
Beverly Dahlen & with H.D. before that. And indeed with
the likes of Pound & Olson. We can still count the number of women
who attempt writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands. So it is worth
noting & celebrating this addition to that roster.

Other Books in Print

Memoirs & Collaborations

Criticism

Anthology

Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman taught at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania & was writer in residenceat the Gloucester Writers Center.